Yes, Chef (33 page)

Was that what really happened?

What seems clear is that my father is a man of great strength and endurance. He has lived twice as long as the life expectancy for men of his generation, he has come back from losses that would ruin others, and he has a spark of leadership that illuminates any room he enters. There’s a brightness to him, a power that comes from having lost everything and survived. And while I will always think of Lennart as my father and Anne Marie as my mother, Tsegie gave me something I never thought I’d have—a living family tree in Ethiopia, and another place to call home.

M
EETING MY FATHER, AND KNOWING THAT
I
HAD BEEN LOVED BY HIM
despite his decades-long absence, gave me the courage to meet my daughter. Not that I didn’t want to meet her before, it was just that it had to be on my terms. Chefs, after all, are well-known control freaks. And so I wanted to make sure that my first meeting with my daughter went off with the precision of a four-star, seven-course meal. I felt like I had to perfect
myself
before meeting her, so that she could find no fault; that’s the chef’s mentality. But after traveling to Ethiopia, to a village that did not exist on any map, and sitting with my father in his dirt-floored hut, something changed: I realized that meeting my daughter was not at all like orchestrating the perfect restaurant meal.
All I needed to do was give Zoe what my father had given me: my own flawed self, without excuses or promises.

My mother, Anne Marie, is baffled by my career—more specifically, what I have given to my career and what I have allowed it to take from me. “How do you have the energy, Macke?” she asks. “How do you do it?” Not being there, she finds it hard to imagine. Just as she rushed, without doubt or hesitation, into motherhood—adopting first Anna, then Linda and me—she never for a second doubted her capacity to love and care for Zoe, her first grandchild.

Almost from the moment Zoe was born, my mother wrote to her in German, a language she’d always loved, and once Zoe was old enough, she began to write back. The summer that Zoe was seven, my mother invited her to visit Smögen, where she spent two weeks with her cousins. My mother never asked for my permission, of course; she merely informed me once the plan was set. I told her I was too busy setting up Aquavit Minneapolis to come along, that work was just too crazy. I always had an excuse. My mother knew it wasn’t a question of having too much work that kept me away. I was still not ready to be a father to Zoe.

My mother was also the one who, from the beginning, took charge of Zoe’s financial future. I established a bank account and funded it, but my mother watched it, invested it, and sent a check to Brigitta, Zoe’s mom, every month. I felt good that Zoe wanted for nothing, money-wise, but that was about as far as it went. The sad fact is, for the first fourteen years of Zoe’s life, I never went to Austria, never sent a postcard or a gift, never picked up the phone and had a conversation with her, never made the slightest effort.

How to explain this and not sound like a jerk? Think of it this way—my absence in Zoe’s life was a train I boarded the moment Brigitta told me she was pregnant, that she was keeping the baby, and that I was free to go. So I went. That train was powered by the steam of my own ambition: I hopped on and I didn’t know where it was headed; I just knew that I couldn’t step off. If I had ended up for good in Switzerland at a resort like Victoria Jungfrau or in France at a place
like Georges Blanc, I truly believe I would have made my way into her life sooner. Things would have been different. But that train didn’t stop there. It kept going, and I followed it around the world, driven by my ambitions. I was young—twenty when I first boarded—and, if I’m going to be honest, incredibly self-absorbed. Along the way, two of the people I loved most in life—my grandmother, Helga, and my father, Lennart—died, and I wasn’t there for either. There was no therapy. There was no working it out. There was just me riding the train and thinking, When this thing stops, when life calms down, when I get there—wherever
there
is—I will deal with it. All of it. The past—whom I left, whom I loved, what I lost—and the future, the future being Zoe.

Thank goodness my mother’s moral compass was so perfectly calibrated. She didn’t just send checks to Zoe, she loved her and let her know that she was a
Samuelsson
. And the relationship my mother had built and nourished for so long kept the lines open long enough for me to come around.

I
N
J
UNE 2005
, I arranged a trip to Austria. I was ready. No more excuses. No more hiding in shame. Zoe was now fourteen and as a teenager, she could either embrace me with open arms or kick me to the curb. All those years ago, I had made my choice: run. Now it was her turn. I’d present myself, let her set the rules for our relationship, and live with the consequences.

First, I flew to Sweden to meet my mother, who would join me on my trip. There was no way I could have made the journey to Austria without her. Meeting her in Göteborg, knowing the journey I was about to take, I’d never needed her strength so much before. Because anything that Zoe and Brigitta did or said would be legitimate. How would I cope if I was forced to spend the night in a windowless hotel room after being rejected by Zoe, crying my eyes out? It would be what I deserved, of course, but how would I deal? There was only one woman in the world who would support me, who might even shed a
tear for me—and that’s my mother. In that moment, when she could have snapped me in half with her judgments of my failures, she chose to treat me with tenderness. “You did what you could, Marcus,” she said, as we boarded the plane for Graz. “You were just a kid yourself.”

Josef, Brigitta’s brother, picked us up at the airport and drove the forty-five minutes from Graz to Zoe’s small town in the beautiful, pastoral Steiermark region of the country. Josef was welcoming and laid-back, just far enough removed to make us feel at ease. He was much more than an uncle to Zoe; he was the father figure in her life. Although he worked in the city and Zoe lived in the country, he came home almost every weekend, for fourteen years, to be with her. I could tell that he adored her.

It surprised me how jealous I felt. Jealous of what they obviously had, and what I did not. But I hadn’t come all this way to be jealous. I came to be humble, to try to begin a relationship that, I hoped, would be filled with friendship and love the rest of our lives.

But my intention couldn’t quite overcome my heart or my training. It’s a little known fact that most chefs are mathematicians. We are constantly calculating: how many pounds of meat, how many orders, how many cups of water, what’s the baking temperature, for how many minutes. If you’ve been a chef for as long as I have, you can’t help but have thousands of formulas in your head. So it didn’t take me long to start doing the math. Josef, tall, handsome, protective, easygoing, was the guy who had been here unfailingly for fourteen years … which is 168 months … which is 5,110 days. That’s a wall I could never scale, because no matter what I did going forward, Josef would always have done more. He would always have
been there
.

I was counting in my head—measuring time, calculating my failures—when I first saw Zoe, and saw the affection in her eyes. She didn’t know me, but she knew me. I was her father and there was no one else who could do the job that I came here, after all these years, to do. She didn’t have to say a word to let me know that she was glad that I was here and that, in this moment, she was not counting a thing except the time it would take for me to embrace her.

So I did. I put aside the shame, and hugged my daughter for the first time.

As a gesture of gratitude—not to mention a deep desire to be back in my comfort zone—I immediately offered to cook for Zoe and her family. I asked Zoe to walk me into the village so we could shop together for groceries. The region where she lives is known for its apples, so I decided to make a potato apple soup for lunch. For dessert, I bought a bar of bittersweet chocolate and a small tin of sea salt.

Peeling two pounds of potatoes kept my hands busy and my nerves in check while Zoe and I worked through the awkwardness and got to know each other a little bit. “Zoe, you’re the one who knows where everything is,” I said. “So if you show me, we’ll do the meal together.” My German isn’t very good, but it was strong enough to fill in the gaps of Zoe’s almost perfect English. Sautéing the onions and the sliced apples was so familiar that it helped take the edge off. I had, in some small way, taken my first step toward being a father that Zoe could know and, hopefully, one day, love. It was a very basic soup, but as I poured the ingredients into the pan—apple cider, milk, nutmeg—I felt as if I were trying out for Escoffier himself: That is how much winning the trust of this girl meant to me. I ladled the soup into a bowl, topping it with chives, and took a breath.

With flour, eggs, and butter, I made a batter that I let rest while Zoe, her family, and my mother ate the soup. I ate mine standing, quickly and without fuss, as if I were on duty at a restaurant with dinner service just about to begin.

After she was done eating, Zoe helped me make chocolate blinis, two-inch pancakes that I topped with melted butter and a sprinkling of the sea salt. Zoe laughed when she saw me with the salt. Salt? On dessert?

“Just wait,” I said.

After she took her first bite, she stopped for a minute, a look of deep concentration passing across her face. Then she broke into a huge smile.

“Gut!”
she said.
“Das ist gut!”

At Aquavit, we served a version of the same little, luxurious chocolate pancakes I made with Zoe as one of our desserts. They are not actual blinis, which are made of buckwheat, a flour that can make some people (including me) violently ill; these have just a touch of cake flour and almond flour in them. They get much of their richness from the egg whites we fold into the batter … as well as the stick of butter that goes into them, the clarified butter they’re fried in, and the melted butter we drizzle on top. I didn’t want to go crazy and create Death by Chocolate here, so I focused on other aspects: quality of ingredients—the freshest butter, a high-quality chocolate like Callebaut or Valrhona; getting the right crispiness by using both a fry pan and the oven; and complexity of flavor, sprinkling the pancakes with melted butter and just a few grains of
fleur de sel
, a pink sea salt from off the coast of Brittany. This contrast between salty and sweet hits the tongue at the same time, and the result, as Zoe said, is
gut
.

When we were together that first day, it was funny: I could see hints of how we were similar. Zoe has confidence and I have confidence. Her room was messy like my room is messy. She had so much of me in her. She liked spicy food; she liked food, even though she never cooked the way I did when I was a kid. It was eerie to stand there and see her move through the kitchen like my grandma Helga—not trained, just a natural. We even laughed in the same way. Everybody noticed it. It was a lot like meeting my brothers and sisters in Ethiopia. We didn’t grow up together, but we had these little commonalities that let us both know that we were not strangers—we were connected.

Each night in Austria, I cooked a meal that I hoped would bring me a little closer to winning Zoe over. I was reaching out the only way I knew how. I cooked her the dishes of my childhood: Helga’s roast chicken; my mom’s spaghetti and peas, to which I now add pancetta; and my grandmother’s fish balls, which I now make with an Indian-style curry. Every day, I went out in search of ingredients I wasn’t sure I would find: red curry paste, lemongrass stalks, coconut milk—but thanks to the globalization of our food culture, even in a little town
near Graz, I could find everything I was looking for. I’m not a gifted pastry chef, but it became clear to me that my daughter had a sweet tooth, so I made sure to give myself plenty of time to compose simple, delicious desserts like red berry cobbler, made with biscuits and a rich, complex filling: sour cherries, raspberries, strawberries, a splash of red wine, and confectioner’s sugar, boiled to bubbly goodness.

A few days into my visit, I was feeling exhausted and overwhelmed by the emotion of it all. It helped to have my mother there as a buffer, especially because her German is so good, and she’s such a kind, open person; she put everyone at ease. But the whole deal: It was a lot to take in. One afternoon when I was feeling the need for some air, I put on my sneakers and said, “I’m going out for a run.” Brigitta surprised me and said, “Wait two minutes, and I’ll come with you.” I think both of us needed to make some peace. For almost fifteen years, we’d never talked—at least not in a real way. We chatted on the phone a few times when something important came up with Zoe and a decision needed to be made, but that was maybe once a year. Not a lot.

It was late August and already feeling like fall, and the sun was low in the sky. People were out picking apples. Brigitta and I ran and ran, talking about Zoe, and I felt so lucky that this woman never judged me, never punished me for not being there. There were never any shouting matches between us, no turning Zoe against me. My mother helped, for sure, but her efforts would have been useless if Brigitta hadn’t been so willing to keep the lines open.

There was so much ground to cover. Brigitta was married now and had two kids in addition to Zoe, and she brushed away my apologies, said it wasn’t necessary for me to ask for forgiveness. Her strength was incredible. I saw right away the ways in which motherhood had been a gift for her. Just like my mother had not cared whether Linda, Anne Marie, and I had been black—all she cared about was being a mother—similarly, Brigitta had not been tortured by the circumstances of Zoe’s birth. What mattered to her was the love she had funneled into her child. I was in awe and told her so: “Congratulations,” I told her as we finished our run, not that she needed to hear
it from me. “You promised you would raise Zoe to the best of your capabilities, and you did it. Thank you.”